Facebook, despite its critics and many competitors, remains a robust social media platform. The SGU has a Facebook page with over 1 million likes, and we use it to drive traffic here and to Science-Based Medicine.

There are pages on Facebook promoting just about any point of view you can imagine. It is a true marketplace of ideas. Like any marketplace, there is the expectation that its rules are fair and its regulation is rational and reasonable.

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Recently the Facebook page, We Love GMOs and Vaccines, was permanently taken down by Facebook and its founder, Stephan Neidenbach, was banned from Facebook for 30 days. What offense did he commit to warrant such draconian treatment? None. He was simply using a Facebook page to promote a pro-science and skeptical attitude toward GMOs and vaccines, specifically to counter the gross misinformation about these technologies by anti-science fringe groups.

Facebook banned the page because of too many complaints. That’s it. They don’t give any evidence of having investigated the page themselves, and they don’t cite any specific examples of posts that violated specific policies.

This is an alarming situation. It means that an online lynch mob can target specific Facebook pages with complaints, because they disagree with the editorial content of the page, and Facebook will obligingly take down the page.

...http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/skepticism-banned-by-facebook/